Online Christmas sales jump by a third in Europe: payment firm

Online Christmas sales in Europe rose steeply from the year before, with even sharper increases for purchases via tablets and smartphones, according to online payment service provider Ogone. You can easily compare the offering of different websites rather than going to stores, ” Ogone managing director Jurgen Verstraete told Reuters in an interview. Ogone provides online payment services to 50,000 companies in 70 countries across the world, with the vast majority of its business in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. It declined to give the total number of transactions in Europe or globally in December, or 2013 as a whole, but said in 2012 it handled 137 million transactions globally worth a total of 16.6 billion euros ($22.57 billion).